Cinema deeply permeates the practice of Clément Étienne.
More than the narratives he produces, the artist is interested in its materiality: light, set design, space, and the processes that give rise to the image. Trained in graphic design before turning to the visual arts, he develops a body of work in which painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation draw on the techniques of the scenic painter as well as those of the printed image.
His research is grounded in science fiction narratives, not to illustrate their fictions, but to question the transformations of our environment. Deserted hotels, abandoned theatres, mineral architectures, or landscapes traversed by bad weather compose spaces where the elements seem to reclaim possession of the places. Fire, rain, air, or oxidation then become forces that transform the image and reveal the fragility of human constructions.
This attention to phenomena runs through his entire work. Airbrush, plaster, mortar, patinas, or chemical reactions become means of exploring the transformative capacities of matter. Surfaces burn, fade, take on pigments, or retain the imprint of a vanished form. The image then seems to appear of its own accord, as if it preserved the memory of the processes that gave it birth.
Between painting, sculpture, and installation, Clément Étienne maintains an uncertainty of the gaze. Scales blur, materials merge, sets sometimes appear real while architecture becomes illusion.
By moving cinema from the screen into the exhibition space, he makes the image a sensitive material, traversed by time, light, and the elements, in which fiction continues to be constructed.
Text by Steven Vandeporta